Using product testing to incorporate media literacy into a middle school science classroom
Date and timeline for implementation: Four months.
Target Audience: Seventh grade science students, their parents, and some members of the community.
Curriculum Goals:Students will
gain knowledge of the scientific method with an authentic project
development skills in writing a good hypothesis
learn how to write a procedure
learn how to design a controlled experiment
learn how to gather, organize and present data for an authentic audience
learn the concepts of independent, dependent and controlled variables
enhance skills in searching for appropriate and useful information
enhance skills in critical reading and analysis
enhance skills in creating platforms for communicating information.
Media Literacy Goals:
Students will understand the basic tenets of media literacy, specifically focusing on the points that all media are constructed and that all media have a message. Students will also understand what product claims are and learn how to analyze them.
Other Goals:
As teachers, our goal was to investigate the effects of using three motivational factors to foster deeper understanding of the curriculum and media literacy goals, namely, student choice, experiential learning and authentic audience. For the students, we were also interested in fostering the satisfaction that comes from working through problems with a long-term goal in mind.
Activities: OVERVIEW: The collaboration between a librarian and a science teacher was begun last year with a science fair. This year, we hoped to enhance that activity and further deepen understandings by focusing the science experiments on product testing. Product testing allowed us to introduce media literacy skills while still allowing for the pursuit of our initial curricular goals and the motivating factors that were important to us. Further, product testing gave the students a chance to work on concrete projects on topics of interest to them. Students could test anything from waterproof mascara to toilet paper and compare their results to product claims. After the projects were completed, we planned to ask students to produce a commercial about the winner, which we hoped would tie up the media literacy component by asking the students to take on the role of media producers, not merely consumers.SPECIFICS:1. Students were shown videos of middle school science fair projects to give them a general understanding of the concept. 2. Students were introduced to media literacy with some decoding activities. 3. Students did a model mini-project of testing three different wood glues. Classes were first shown an Elmer's glue commercial and asked to decode it. Then as a class were shown 3 different wood glue websites and asked to decode them: Gorilla Glue, Elemer's Glue and Sumo Glue.4. Students brain-stormed ideas for products they'd be interested in testing and partner / teams were formed around common interests5. Once the product type was chosen, students investigated the background of it, usually by looking in Wikipedia, which worked quite well.6. Students were also asked to find the chemical make-up of each product and did this in a variety of ways: some used Material Safety Data Sheets, when available, some used the packaging itself, and some continued to rely on Wikipedia. Interestingly, often the packaging had little or not ingredients listed!7. Students found the product claims for each product.8. Using the information gathered, students worked on phrasing the final question to be answered and creating a hypothesis.9. With the help of their teachers, students wrote procedures to test the hypothesis and listed materials needed. In some cases, procedures were difficult to figure out, so further research was necessary. We looked at magazine databases for sources such as "Consumer Reports" or Googled the particulars. Each way was effective for different products; no one way worked in every situation.10. Students bought the products (or we bought them for them) and ran their experiments in any venue that worked for them, school or home. In the majority of cases, we were very involved with the actual experimental procedure as we took a very "hands-on" approach.11. Students recorded information in data tables.12. Students were brought back into the library to finish the analysis of their projects, including, creating results tables on Word, and graphing the data on "Create-a-graph" found online, writing an analysis of the data, and composing a conclusion statement. The conlcusion statement was to reflect the results of the experiments compared to the product claims.13. Students worked with their ELA teacher to create a persuasive writing piece about their winning product. 14. Some students through an "enrichment" class created videos of the science fair event to show future students.To help students plan their projects and organize the information they'd be collected, we distributed spiral-bound workbooks. We included the following pages, as well as some other worksheets and areas to take notes.
Assessment/Evaluation (how will you know your APP works to meet your goals?):Our assessment will be the PSAs that the students create along with their explanation about how they constructed the message and why. They will need to be able to defend their creative and intellectual decisions based on their experiments and research. What format are you thinking of having them work with? Will you train them? How can you keep the production work boundaried? Let's talk about this.
Resources/Support that will help you in your development of the APP:We have been using the PLS book on "Chemicals in the Environment," How is that working?YouTube, Google Images, magazines, various websites
Difficulties/Obstacles to developing your APP: Time -- not enough of, finding relevant media examples, our learning curve in terms of guiding discussions on media literacyI have some ideas here
Application Project Plan (APP) Planning Sheet
Name: John Heath and Sandy Stiles
Using product testing to incorporate media literacy into a middle school science classroom
Date and timeline for implementation: Four months.
Target Audience: Seventh grade science students, their parents, and some members of the community.
Curriculum Goals:Students will
Media Literacy Goals:
Students will understand the basic tenets of media literacy, specifically focusing on the points that all media are constructed and that all media have a message. Students will also understand what product claims are and learn how to analyze them.
Other Goals:
As teachers, our goal was to investigate the effects of using three motivational factors to foster deeper understanding of the curriculum and media literacy goals, namely, student choice, experiential learning and authentic audience. For the students, we were also interested in fostering the satisfaction that comes from working through problems with a long-term goal in mind.
Activities:
OVERVIEW: The collaboration between a librarian and a science teacher was begun last year with a science fair. This year, we hoped to enhance that activity and further deepen understandings by focusing the science experiments on product testing. Product testing allowed us to introduce media literacy skills while still allowing for the pursuit of our initial curricular goals and the motivating factors that were important to us. Further, product testing gave the students a chance to work on concrete projects on topics of interest to them. Students could test anything from waterproof mascara to toilet paper and compare their results to product claims. After the projects were completed, we planned to ask students to produce a commercial about the winner, which we hoped would tie up the media literacy component by asking the students to take on the role of media producers, not merely consumers.SPECIFICS:1. Students were shown videos of middle school science fair projects to give them a general understanding of the concept. 2. Students were introduced to media literacy with some decoding activities. 3. Students did a model mini-project of testing three different wood glues. Classes were first shown an Elmer's glue commercial and asked to decode it. Then as a class were shown 3 different wood glue websites and asked to decode them: Gorilla Glue, Elemer's Glue and Sumo Glue.4. Students brain-stormed ideas for products they'd be interested in testing and partner / teams were formed around common interests5. Once the product type was chosen, students investigated the background of it, usually by looking in Wikipedia, which worked quite well.6. Students were also asked to find the chemical make-up of each product and did this in a variety of ways: some used Material Safety Data Sheets, when available, some used the packaging itself, and some continued to rely on Wikipedia. Interestingly, often the packaging had little or not ingredients listed!7. Students found the product claims for each product.8. Using the information gathered, students worked on phrasing the final question to be answered and creating a hypothesis.9. With the help of their teachers, students wrote procedures to test the hypothesis and listed materials needed. In some cases, procedures were difficult to figure out, so further research was necessary. We looked at magazine databases for sources such as "Consumer Reports" or Googled the particulars. Each way was effective for different products; no one way worked in every situation.10. Students bought the products (or we bought them for them) and ran their experiments in any venue that worked for them, school or home. In the majority of cases, we were very involved with the actual experimental procedure as we took a very "hands-on" approach.11. Students recorded information in data tables.12. Students were brought back into the library to finish the analysis of their projects, including, creating results tables on Word, and graphing the data on "Create-a-graph" found online, writing an analysis of the data, and composing a conclusion statement. The conlcusion statement was to reflect the results of the experiments compared to the product claims.13. Students worked with their ELA teacher to create a persuasive writing piece about their winning product. 14. Some students through an "enrichment" class created videos of the science fair event to show future students.To help students plan their projects and organize the information they'd be collected, we distributed spiral-bound workbooks. We included the following pages, as well as some other worksheets and areas to take notes.
What format are you thinking of having them work with? Will you train them? How can you keep the production work boundaried? Let's talk about this.
Resources/Support that will help you in your development of the APP: We have been using the PLS book on "Chemicals in the Environment," How is that working?YouTube, Google Images, magazines, various websites
Difficulties/Obstacles to developing your APP: Time -- not enough of, finding relevant media examples, our learning curve in terms of guiding discussions on media literacy I have some ideas here
Planning Steps: (see project title)